Introduction

There was a consistency between that first meeting with the Pages and all the subsequent meetings I was honored to have with other survivors. Survivors are often small or average-sized, compact people, but they burn with a towering ardor. I met apparently ordinary people in apparently ordinary living rooms of varying affluence, but from their lips nightmarish tales fell—tales of the collapse of a moral order, of the utter denial of the European and human fraternity.

After a time it was not so much their survival then, between 1939 and 1945, that amazed me—even though the odds against survival were so massive. It is the fact that the survival of horror did not in itself destroy them now. That is, the miracle seems that they are willing to have pictures on the wall, to sit on furniture made by other humans, and display family pictures on mantelpieces and pianos.

The miracle seems to be that they are willing to make these investments in the present structures of daily life, when their entire education under the Nazis and their collaborators has taught them that the human species, roused to its favorite passion of race hate, cannot be trusted. It is that, having survived, they have practiced the skills of living all over again. They have practiced them in DP (Displaced Persons) camps and in great American cities upon their disoriented arrival. They have practiced them in the midst of the long hours of their American labors, practiced them by risking their American children in the open, dangerous air. With the risk-taking, which is the better side of their unquenchable lives, they have remade themselves—more robustly than I know I ever could have done in similar circumstances. They invest themselves and their children in us, the untried masses of the new world, who have never been through the same things they had. They honor us with normal conversation and, on occasion, entrust to us glimpses of the cannibal era, of barbarities done to them in the name of race hysteria.

These men and women are consumed by a need to ensure that the rest of us believe in the authenticity of what they went through. They have been forced to this by an extraordinary phenomenon. The world accepts the validity of other hecatombs of this bloody century: No one denies the massacre of non-Jewish Poles by both Soviets and Nazis. No one denies the vengeance Stalin brought down on fellow Slavs, such as the Ukrainians. No one denies the slaughter of the Armenians. No one denies the killing fields of Cambodia. No one denies any of the other savageries of World War II, including Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And yet, the uniquely constructed and state-implemented process called the Holocaust is almost routinely questioned, denied, explained away, or minimized.

This, too, the people of The Triumphant Spirit must now struggle with—not only the horror they saw, but the denial of that horror. With this grief added to the grief of memory, look at the portraits in this book and tell me that their composure, their human grace, is not a triumph of spirit.

They have turned their faces to the camera of Nick Del Calzo who has lovingly photographed them. They are aware that their time on earth is not as extensive as it was when they were first rescued and brought to America. They want us, and others as yet unborn, to see in this book some of the evidence of what they were subjected to and what they have surmounted. I congratulate them on their survival and on appearing here, showing their human faces to us, and I congratulate Nick Del Calzo for having the initiative to bring this project to fruition.